The drought and famine in East Africa is already throwing up some uncomfortable questions for the model of large scale agro-investment in a poor country for export, says this article on 'How would an agribusiness be able to export maize from a famine-stricken country that depends on the crop as its staple food? The furore over South Korean company Daewoo's plans to grow export maize in Madagascar was at least in a mainly rice-eating country. But imagine an investor had spent years and millions of dollars developing export-maize plantations in a mainly maize-eating east African country amidst the region's current famine.'

Journalists and civil society members in West Africa analysed a 'counter-terrorism plan' drawn up by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) at a 4-5 August meeting in the Senegalese capital Dakar. Main issues that emerged were the need to strengthen regional cooperation and to address root causes of terrorism - poverty and lack of education, said Biram Diop, director of the African Institute for Security Sector Transformation, who facilitated discussions.

Somalia's government has offered an open amnesty to al-Shabab fighters after the rebels made a surprise withdrawal from the capital, Mogadishu, over the weekend. 'We offer an amnesty - put down your weapons and your guns, and come and join the people and your society,' Abdirahman Osman, a government spokesman, was quoted as saying by the AFP news agency on Tuesday. Al-Shabab, who still govern over much of southern Somalia, have waged a bloody war since 2007 to topple the Western-backed transitional government.

Nearly one third of Tanzanian girls experience sexual violence before they turn 18, a Unicef survey has found. The figure among boys is 13.4 per cent, says the UN children's agency. The most common form of abuse is sexual touching, followed by attempted intercourse, it says. Unicef official Andy Brooks said the survey was the most comprehensive carried out on this issue in any country and showed the government was prepared to tackle the problem.

After initially trying 'quiet diplomacy', Ghanaian LGBT have formed an alliance with civil society supporters to oppose an increasingly vociferous anti-gay campaign in that country. A Coalition Against Homophobia in Ghana (CAHG) has been announced. It says: 'The Coalition has among its objectives to create a friendly rapport between the media and the LGBT community and also educate people to respect the rights of LGBT people’s privacy and human dignity, which is a vital part of fundamental human rights.'

Forced to survive on wild fruits in the face of drought and food insecurity, hungry Kenyans could soon face the dilemma of eating genetically modified food. The verdict among the scientific community is that the poor are paying the price for runaway graft that precipitated theft and illegal sale of strategic national food reserves to foreigners. Between 2008 and 2009, the Ministry of Agriculture, then under the watch of suspended minister William Ruto, came under criticism for irregular sale of three million bags of maize reserves and the sale of fertiliser to central African countries. After it announced it would allow millers to import GM maize, the Government faces accusations of mortgaging the lives of more than 10 million hungry Kenyans to multinational companies.

reports that residents of Ohwim-Amanfrom near Kumasi in the Ashanti Region of Ghana are protesting the siting and operations of a factory in the area. According to them, paper manufacturer, T &Y Company, is polluting their environment, which exposes them to health risks and also destroys aquatic life. The Chinese factory started operating in the community about two years ago. The company recycles plastic waste and produces toilet rolls and other plastic products.

The Independent newspaper in the United Kingdom reports on how the United Nations and the Kenyan government have come in for a fresh round of criticism for the continued closure of a multimillion-pound refugee camp that has been left empty despite the deepening humanitarian crisis in the Horn of Africa. 'The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has been accused of misdirecting the media by renaming scrubland adjacent to empty facilities, rather than sealing a deal with Kenya to open up a camp that cost international donors $60m (£37m) to build and has been left locked since November last year.'

Reuters reports that South Africa's proposed National Health Insurance programme, aimed at giving greater access to healthcare for the country's poor, will require 125 billion rand in 2012 and 214 billion rand by 2020, according to a government source. The NHI, currently being discussed by the government and other parties in South Africa's healthcare system, will require 255 billion rand by 2025, the source said citing the document.

The United Nations Human Rights Council should accept responsibility, on behalf of the world forum, for the famine spreading through eastern Africa, and should call for member countries' cooperation to overcome the desperate food crisis there, experts said. One of the 18 independent experts on the advisory committee to the Council, Chilean academic José Antonio Bengoa, set forth the idea of asking for an urgent special session, in an attempt to draw the attention of the international community to the gravity of the crisis in the Horn of Africa.

Undeterred by police warnings, the opposition have said they are resuming nationwide protests to express their dissatisfaction with the government’s handling of the high and rising cost of living in the country. Masaka Municipality MP and national coordinator of Activists for Change pressure group, which is leading the protests, Mr Mathias Mpuuga, said that protesters would only bow to police attempts to stop their plans if police quoted the specific law empowering it to prevent them from exercising their constitutional right to hold a peaceful demonstration.

This blog article tackles the issue of how to end conflict in the DRC. 'Ending the world's deadliest conflict is no easy task, but a growing consensus of Congolese civil society, electronics and metals companies, investors, and governments are now taking action to do so. A chief driver of their work is the Dodd-Frank legislation on conflict minerals, which is why a coalition of 40 Congolese human rights groups called it "the leverage needed to instill and impose ethical business practices in the Great Lakes region."'

ZANU PF has strongly denied the existence of torture camps near the controversial Chiadzwa diamond fields, after video evidence of the ongoing abuses by the military there was released. The UK’s BBC Panorama investigative series has revealed that the camps have been operational in the Marange region for the last three years, and the explosive report shows how civilians are subject to severe beatings and sexual attacks. But Mines Minister Obert Mpofu has denied the camps exist, calling it 'cheap propaganda from the BBC'.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR), Navi Pillay, said that 'an estimated 370 million indigenous people' globally have lost or face the threat of losing their ancestral lands and natural resources due to 'unjust exploitation for the sake of development', PANA reported. According to UNHCR, when indigenous communities are alienated from their lands because of development and natural resource extraction projects, they are often left to scrape an existence on the margins of society.

There is no bi-lateral agreement between South Africa and Zimbabwe to prevent refugees from the famine-wracked Horn of Africa entering South Africa, said state officials last week. The statements from the South African department of Home Affairs and the Zimbabwean Ministry of Foreign Affairs this week are in direct contrast to statements appearing on the South African Home Affairs website, and Zimbabwean news reports on Zimbabwe’s decision to bar entry to Somali and Ethiopian refugees.

Joseph Kaute, the 43-year-old gay Cameroonian who was due to be deported from the UK, is back at Harmondsworth detention centre, thanks to Air France, the airline that was due to fly him from Heathrow back to Yaoundé via Paris. It was the third attempt to deport him. 'Air France refused to allow me to board,' Mr. Kaute told UK Gay News.

The Institute for Race Relations in the United Kingdom reports on prisoner transfer agreements between the UK and other countries. 'For the past few years, under pressure from right-wing Tories, the government has made strenuous attempts to reach agreements with countries such as Nigeria to enable prisoners serving sentences here to be compulsorily repatriated to complete their sentences in their home countries, so as to save costs, reduce the foreign national prisoner (FNP) population and make space for British prisoners.'

The New York Times profiles the use of private US military contractors in the war in Somalia, introducing the story with Richard Rouget, whom they describe as 'a gun for hire over two decades of bloody African conflict'. The story goes on: 'Rouget, 51, commanded a group of foreign fighters during Ivory Coast’s civil war in 2003, was convicted by a South African court of selling his military services and did a stint in the presidential guard of the Comoros Islands, an archipelago plagued by political tumult and coup attempts. Now Mr. Rouget works for Bancroft Global Development, an American private security company that the State Department has indirectly financed to train African troops who have fought a pitched urban battle in the ruins of this city against the Shabab, the Somali militant group allied with Al Qaeda.'

A sign of cordial relations between Rwanda and Uganda?

This video posted on Youtube provides a simple explanation of the US debt crisis and why it spells disaster for the global economy. What the world is facing, says the video, is complete global economic collapse, something that has never happened before. And it's not a matter of if it will happen, but when.